Do you need to be amazing at maths to work in Payroll?

uponahill

Notmyrealname wrote: »

I'll ask you a simple question:

Would you want someone who is "just Ok" at maths to be in charge of sorting out your wages?

Although maths isn't as important as it used to be, you still need to have a good foundation to spot mistakes.

Also, how knowledgeable are you about SAGE? Most places use Sage Payroll.

How would you cope if SAGE went down? You couldn't very well tell the employees - 'sorry no wages today, the computer is broken'

Savvy_Sue

hcb42 wrote: »

depends how you define - good at maths....

I cannot see anything in payroll that is more complicated than add subtract, multiply and divide - and being confident with percentages and decimals.

I'd say that being confident in using a calculator / Excel is more important than being good at mental arithmetic. If you know roughly what the answer is going to be, then you can avoid making stupid errors, eg I know that holiday pay is calculated at 12.07%, so I know that if someone has worked 10 hours their holiday pay will be a bit over 1/10 of that. If I forget that I can multiply by .1207 and get 1.207 hours, at least I know that if I get an answer of more than 2 hours, I've gone wrong somewhere ...

Evilm wrote: »

(I know of one person who does it all by hand but I don't really think he's the norm.)

I used to do it all by hand - or at least from the tax tables but with my trusty calculator - but the HMRC site then gave an online calculator, which made things a lot faster for me!

uponahill wrote: »

How would you cope if SAGE went down? You couldn't very well tell the employees - 'sorry no wages today, the computer is broken'

:rotfl: very true, the one time I can get people NOT to interrupt me is if I say I'm doing something about salaries.

BTW, I'd always have said I was hopeless with maths, but I've got better with practical practice!

heretolearn_2

You don't need to be amazing at maths but I'd say you need some level of number awareness/numeracy understanding, so that you can spot 'oh oh, that looks wrong' and go and check for errors/problems. This is where a lot of accountants fall down funnily enough - I've met full-on qualified accountants who just don't have that awareness of how numbers work in practical situations. That's a difference skill to being able to memorise forumulas and so on.

If you are ok on arithmatic and can understand the hows and whys of percentages and fractions in real situations (not just know 'well I times it by 100 because I'm told to times by 100') you'll do well.

You can do payroll without those abilities - plenty of people do. But you'll struggle to spot and sort out errors and you'll really struggle to explain things to other people, which is an important part of the job. Can you get someone who is scared to death of numbers to understand what's happened to their pay when they have a query?

Tiggy_Wiggy

heretolearn wrote: »

This is where a lot of accountants fall down funnily enough - I've met full-on qualified accountants who just don't have that awareness of how numbers work in practical situations. That's a difference skill to being able to memorise forumulas and so on.

Yes I've met a few of these too. I call them auditors :rotfl:

Any

How good you are in Sage is neither here nor there, sorry, but OP asked about need of math for payroll career, I wasn't born using Sage and I still became an accountant!!!!
There is no relevance. We use Pegasus and I can train basic payroll clerk in half a day!!

OP - most of the stuff today is done by software. And calculators. So you don't need to have the skill to add 269 and 772 in your head in space of 0.01 seconds, or multiply 268x69 in space of 0.02 seconds, but you do need to have grasp of % for example.

It's more about the logics. And most companies already have rules in place anyway! There is a sheet of how many holidays do you get for the year if you started in week 7 for example. Or you might have to calculate: if employee get 25 days holidays per annum and they only worked 10 months how many holidays did they accrue? Or similar..

Then there is the knowledge of PAYE, operation of tax codes, NI rules etc... nothing to do with maths per se, just rules to learn... and they change all the time.

So unless you cannot add 2 and 2 I would say you have a shot as long as you area paying attention.

getmore4less

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

I'd say that being confident in using a calculator / Excel is more important than being good at mental arithmetic. If you know roughly what the answer is going to be, then you can avoid making stupid errors, eg I know that holiday pay is calculated at 12.07%, so I know that if someone has worked 10 hours their holiday pay will be a bit over 1/10 of that. If I forget that I can multiply by .1207 and get 1.207 hours, at least I know that if I get an answer of more than 2 hours, I've gone wrong somewhere ...

I used to do it all by hand - or at least from the tax tables but with my trusty calculator - but the HMRC site then gave an online calculator, which made things a lot faster for me!

:rotfl: very true, the one time I can get people NOT to interrupt me is if I say I'm doing something about salaries.

BTW, I'd always have said I was hopeless with maths, but I've got better with practical practice!

That only applies if the full time workers holidayss are the statutory minimum.

How many can work out the to % that should be used for part time/hourly workers if the holidays are not statutory?

FATBALLZ

Notmyrealname wrote: »

Would you want someone who is "just Ok" at maths to be in charge of sorting out your wages?

It's worked out well for me so far, I'm over 2 grand up from a couple of mediocre payroll departments making a mess of my wages.

For the record, I told them of the mistake each time and they told me they'd sort it and then just seemed to not know how to fix it and gave up.